Chris McGreal reports from Doma, where white farmers are under siege
They see it as their Kosovo. The last few dozen white farmers left in a sprawling patch of northern Zimbabwe have fallen back on tactics learned from the Rhodesian bush war three decades ago, but without the guns.
From before dawn until after midnight the white men of Doma patrol the sprawling web of farm tracks in pairs, staying in touch by radio, in an attempt to counter the organised plunder of their homes.
It is a largely futile attempt to protect property but the broader intent is to establish that, while their wives and children may have gone, Doma’s farmers will not be driven out.
“This is an attempt at ethnic cleansing,” said Vernon Nicolle, a farmer who has come under attack in the past few days. “There’s absolutely no doubt that it’s orchestrated and aimed at driving whites out of the area. It’s not the poor little farm workers like the government is saying. That bastard [President Robert] Mugabe is behind it. In Europe, you call that ethnic cleansing.”
There is little doubt that Zimbabwe’s masters have shifted away from enforcing partial land redistribution towards driving whites off the farms altogether, and perhaps eventually out of the country.
Mugabe has said the liberation war against whites continues. Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi chose to stop in troubled Chinhoyi on a recent state visit, and called for all whites to be booted out of Zimbabwe. The state media gave his comments great prominence.
Last weekend Zimbabwe’s Vice- President, Joseph Msika, took it a step further, saying: “Whites are not human beings.”
The attacks evidently orchestrated by Mugabe loyalists over the past week cover an area of about 260km2 north of the town of Chinhoyi. Worst hit are farms around Doma where a third of white-owned houses have been comprehensively looted. So-called veterans of the independence fight have warned whites never to return to the area.
Women and children have fled all 90 white-owned properties in the area, mostly to Harare or South Africa. Among them is the family of Anthony Manning, who mans the security radio control room from a Doma farm house.
“We moved every single person out of this area women, children, the elderly, the sick. We didn’t know if the convoys would get out because of the mayhem and roadblocks. Where we couldn’t fly, we had to take all sorts of back roads. We are the only ones left,” he said.
So now 34 white men remain. In the Rhodesian war, it was white farmers as part-time soldiers against black insurgents. The division is much the same these days, but now it is the farmers who have the state against them.
“We’re not going to capitulate, come hell or high water. They can wreck our property but we won’t be driven out,” said Manning. “There’s a lot of experience among us. There’s a guy who was in the [Rhodesian] SAS. We know how to organise these things. We would love to go in and deal with these guys because we have the weapons. I can tell you last night it was touch and go whether we did. But we know that would be counter-productive.
“Our strategy has been to try to monitor where they are next. We are operating in three groups. If they go for the southern front and we move there then they hit the northern or eastern front.”
The patrols can do no more than report a house under attack or a convoy of looters to the police. Farmers comment sarcastically on how swiftly the police turned up to arrest the 21 farmers whose alleged attack on black settlers sparked the crisis, according to the government. They say the same force is nowhere to be seen when whites are attacked.
“The police pulled back to let places be looted,” said Manning. “There was an attack on a farm 5km from the police station. When we called, the police said they had no vehicles. When we offered to take them, the police said they can’t go in civilian vehicles.”
Manning’s farm is among those targeted. “About 250 people arrived in seven tractors and trailers. They had axes and sticks. One of them broke my foreman’s arm with an iron bar. If we had stayed I am 99% sure we would be dead,” he said.
About three dozen looters descended on another property, Dawn Farm. One of the farm workers watched the scene. First went the curtains, bedding, carpets and wall hangings. Attention turned to electronic goods then beds, cupboards and even toilets.
With the house emptied, the looters went for fertiliser and farm tools. It was all piled high on tractors and trailers and hauled away. Tractors laden with plundered property can be seen quite openly making their way on the main road out of Doma towards Chinhoyi, about 80km north-west of Harare.
But the destruction goes further than mere theft. On Stirling Vale farm someone took to the electric stove with a vengeance, ripping off its door and destroying the hot plates, not in an attempt to steal it but to ensure it could not be used again. Almost every window in the house was smashed and the bath ripped out but not taken away.
The farmers see such destruction as evidence of an attempt to drive them out. “Why would you destroy an oven or the freezer or rip out the bath? They want to prevent us coming back. To be honest, I think that will work in one or two cases. I know one woman who has told her husband she is never coming back even if it means the end of their marriage. But that is not the case with most of us. We will help each other rebuild and try to sit it out until that bastard [Mugabe] is gone,” said a farmer on patrol at Stirling Vale.
The crisis flared a week ago with the arrest of 21 white farmers near Chinhoyi for allegedly assaulting black settlers. The government’s version is that the farmers assaulted defenceless peasants in an attempt to drive them from land given to them under the redistribution programme.
“The farmers have been attacking property and legally resettled farmers … it is the farmers who are unleashing this violence,” said Minister of Home Affairs John Nkomo.
The government claims that popular outrage at the farmers provoked the looting. The whites see it differently. They believe the arrested men were led into a trap.
They say the war veterans attacked a white-owned farm knowing that neighbours would come to the aid of the trapped family. Then the war veterans called the police and claimed they were the ones under attack. The arrests were then used to justify the unleashing of war veterans and others against farmers across the area.
The attacks appear to be well coordinated. The farmers say the operation in Doma is run from a farm seized from an outspoken opposition supporter.
Alan York Zimbabwe’s “Cattleman of the Year” was in Australia on business when the war vets moved on to his land a week ago. First the house was trashed. What was not taken was tossed into the swimming pool. Almost half his 5 000 cattle were driven away and roadblocks thrown up outside the farm.
Among those visiting the farm over recent days has been the Minister of Local Government and Housing, Ignatius Chombo, who is at the forefront of pushing land redistribution.
Caught in the midst of the violence are the black farm labourers. About 9000 workers and their families are hit by the upheaval in Doma.
Because the government wants to portray the land seizures as spontaneous and led by farm workers against abusive white owners, the labourers are pushed to the forefront of land occupations.
Some are torn between genuine resentment at poor working conditions and the fear of not having a job. Others stand up to the war veterans.
“Our labour is in an incredibly difficult situation,” said Manning. “Those bastards are going to twist this. They said our guys are landless and they did it, and it’s not true. That is their home there. We have a proper village lights, water, a school. They are not the perpetrators. They are caught in the middle.”
It is probable that having stirred the cauldron, the government will quell the violence and then claim to be moderating between land-hungry peasants and unreconstructed Rhodesian white farmers.
The first signs came in Tuesday’s Herald newspaper, which trumpeted the arrest of 40 suspected looters in Doma as evidence that the police were not standing idly by. But even that report had a spin. The Herald claimed most of those arrested were farm labourers, implying that the white farmers’ own workers had turned on them.
The message to Mugabe’s supporters has been pressed home: the constraints have been loosened a little more.
Ian Smith’s heir, page 22